Lets stop brain drain ?

I had my Primary education at a school just yards away from my house. Then, I (was) moved to a different school for my Upper Primary education. Then to a different school at the nearest city for the Secondary education.

Why was that I moved to different schools in spite of the earlier ones following the same model and syllabi? Just that I was told that they are better schools.

Let’s dig deeper now. In my case, after Xth std, our school topper decided to stay at the same school for his secondary schooling. The 2nd and the 3rd rankers moved to different schools. But the secondary school results were no different. My Xth school topper was still the topper and the 2nd and 3rd were still 2nd & 3rd, in spite of different schooling.

Are schools getting better bcz of better students joining them (or) Are students getting better bcz of the better schools? It’s more of a Catch 22. But the first choice seems to be better!

So, is it good to force people to study at the nearest school? No, it looks absurd! It’s against the law of economics. It prevents competition and develops complacency. Schools should do their best to retain their best students.

But, if the analogy can be applied to people moving abroad, I would say
i) Same people would have attained the same level of success even if they had stayed in India bcz of their hard work
ii) Indian institutes should do their best to attract their best people instead of complaining about BRAIN DRAIN.

The fallacy of Price Control !!!

This is an extract from ET editorial...

The author argues that the price control of the drugs would do more harm than good for India. He cites example of Germany, where the price control of drugs has benefited about 18$ billion in reduced drug prices but has driven out 22$ billion in R&D investment.

His solutions:
He wants health insurance to play a major role and thus sharing the risk of medication among the people.
He wants Government to play a major role in R&D funding so that cheaper products can developed and shared.

If deregulation of cement prices can make India the second largest producer of cement & delicensing of telecom can drastically reduce the phone bills, so can the phara industry.

His argument seems to be absolutely right. We should concentrate on improving the reach of health insurance, so that every one has access to quality drugs and facilities, rather than tinkering with the drug prices. But until then let people have access to cheaper drugs.

a bit of common sense ?

India seems to be really fast developing. So, what should be done to further accelerate the pace? Infrastructure, Finance, FII, FDI,...? More than these, what we need is a bit more common sense on what we do now.

Power:
The power sector growth hardly touches 5 %. Government has already tried pulling private sector, giving tax sops and a lot more options. What could be done is,
The T&D losses in some states are around 10% while in other states they are around 50%. T&D has now become a synonym for power theft. If this can be plugged, it would result in
1) 40 % more availability of power at zero financial cost.
2) less subsidy for the discoms as they now get paid for what was lost earlier.
3) less electricity bill as T&D losses are generally added to our elec. bills.

Roads:
NHAI is doing a really good job in building world class roads. At the same pace, it would take decades to bring the same infrastructure everywhere. More important than building the roads is to make people follow some road rules.
1) A through license test before issuing a driving license would reduce the road accidents more than what the traffic signals and the sign boards would do.
2) Enforcing some basics like wearing helmets, seat belts would drastically reduce the no of lives lost in accidents.

Irrigation:
The 600 thousand crore river interlinking project is highly debated and still in proposal stage. Should we spend so much of money in disturbing an ecosystem? Don’t we have a better solution?
We definitely have a lot of implementable better solutions
1) Instead of disturbing the ecosystem to suit our irrigation needs, can't we better change our irrigation needs to suit what our ecosystem supports. What is needed is just a bit of education for the farmers on what their piece of land could support.
2) Gujarat has really demonstrated how better water management could solve the problems of farmers.
3) Dry land farming. With escalating oil prices, Jatropa and other oil seeds could be a better option for dry lands.
4) The thousands of crores could be spent on building cold storage and creating better market for the agricultural produce.

to be continued...